Quantification of muscle coordination underlying basic shoulder movements using muscle synergy extraction

Abstract Numerous muscles around the shoulder joint are required to work in a coordinated manner, even when a basic shoulder movement is executed. Muscle synergy can be utilized as an index to determine muscle coordination. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the muscle coordination among different shoulder muscles underlying basic shoulder movements based on muscle synergy. Thirteen men performed 14 multiplanar shoulder movements; five movements were associated with elevation and lowering, while five were associated with horizontal abduction and adduction. The four additional movements were simple rotations at different positions. Muscle activity was measured from 12 muscle portions using surface electromyography. Using the dimensionality reduction technique, synergies were extracted first for each movement separately (“separate” synergies), and then for the global dataset (containing all movements; “global” synergies). The least number that provided 90% of the variance accounted for was selected as the optimal number of synergies. For each subject, approximately two separate synergies and approximately six global synergies with small residual values were extracted from the separate and global electromyography datasets, respectively. Specific patterns of these muscle synergies in each task were observed during each movement. In the cross-validation method, six global synergies explained 88.0 ± 1.3% of the global dataset. These findings indicate that muscle activities underlying basic shoulder movements are expressed as six units, and these units could be proxies for shoulder muscle coordination.